A well-cultivated mind is, so to speak, made up of all the minds of preceding ages; it is only one single mind which has been educated during all this time.

A work of morality, politics, criticism will be more elegant, other things being equal, if it is shaped by the hand of geometry.

To despise theory is to have the excessively vain pretension to do without knowing what one does, and to speak without knowing what one says.

I feel nothing, apart from a certain difficulty in continuing to exist.

We must always skim over pleasures. They are like marshy lands that we must travel nimbly, hardly daring to put down our feet.

It is beauty that begins to please, and tenderness that completes the cbarm.

It is the passions that do and undo everything.